Is video game addiction real? Former players, statistics say yes

Is video game addiction real? Former players, statistics say yes

The World Health Organization has officially designated video game addiction as a disorder, and one former addict warns we can no longer ‘just see them as fun, innocent games that people play for entertainment.’

What the 5-foot-9, 150-pound defenceman with the Okanagan Hockey Academy’s midget 3A team lacked in size, he made up for in guts.

“I was an extremely aggressive defenceman, to the point where I had three separated shoulders,” the 29-year-oldCalgary native said, laughing.

“I was very undersized for my league. I was playing against kids who were 200 pounds … but I was right in their face.”

When he was on the ice, everything else melted away but the game. He was fiercely competitive. He hated to lose.

But hockey was a dam that held back an obsession; and when those recurring shoulder injuries meant he had to leave competitive hockey behind in Grade 12, it left his demon unfettered. It began to consume his life, piece by piece, relationship by relationship. Entire days were lost to it. His grades slipping, he dropped out of school. He lied to his parents, using a cover story that he had a part-time job several times, when in fact he was sneaking back home to get his fix.

It wasn’t long before he found himself in front of his computer, his eyes awash with tears, his breath coming in convulsive gasps, writing a farewell note to his family and friends.

“It’s hard to compete with some of the external factors. I think we all know the issues, whether it’s video games or in-house environments,” said Mark Rogers, former Canadian national team soccer player and the current technical director of the South Delta United Soccer Club.

“It’s getting harder and harder to keep the attention and passion of young kids on sport. And you have to look in the mirror and see what you’re doing, what’s not translating to them, what’s not fun to them.”

And unlike the current youth sports system, game developers not only know exactly what their end users want, they’re constantly tweaking and improving their product.

“Games have fundamentally changed,” Adair said. “We can’t just see them as fun, innocent games that people play for entertainment.”

Separate studies using differing methodology and definitions of addiction put the number of youth addicted to video games anywhere between five and 12 per cent, with similar behaviours also manifesting among those who weren’t classified as addicted.

Game developers have no reason to change their methods. Adair said Blizzard, which makes popular games like Overwatch, Diablo, Starcraft and World of Warcraft, earned US$7 billion last year, US$4 billion of which was from in-game purchases and micro-transactions.

Jen MacLean, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association, pushed back on WHO’s stance on gaming as a disorder, saying in a lengthy Twitter post in June: “Let’s be clear here: Loving games is not a mental health problem. Making games your hobby of choice is not a disorder. The WHO’s creation of a ‘gaming disorder’ has the potential to do significant and serious harm to people who use games as a coping mechanism for anxiety, depression, and stress — and may encourage doctors to address the symptoms but not the underlying illnesses.”

Elizabeth Loudon, a counsellor at Cedars at Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island, has seen a rise in patients with gaming addiction, describing one young man as having bruises and blisters on his hands from gaming for days at a time.

“I think the more time somebody spends hooked into a video game … they’re getting that dopamine loop,” she said. “What they know at that point is video games, and video games are sneaky and they trap you. You get lost in the fantasy of the game versus the reality of life.

“No matter what you insert as something people want to use, whether it be video games or methamphetamines or crack cocaine, it’s going to hit the brain in a similar fashion. The people that develop (video games) understand that. They understand what the brain is looking for, and how to hook a young person to get that dopamine rush over and over again, and so it hooks them into wanting to play continuously. They know what it takes to do that. And it’s sad to say that.”

Adair knows that point all too well. After his brush with suicide, he quit gaming cold turkey and dedicated himself to helping others like himself, starting GameQuitters.com. His website is packed with stunning testimonials from those who’ve stared game addiction in the face and come out the other side.

He now travels the world as a speaker on the issue.

“I describe myself a bit as the no-fun police,” he joked over a crackly Skype connection this week from Thailand, where he is doing work for The Cabin Addiction Centre, a ritzy-looking rehab facility that sees most of its clients from the United Kingdom, the U.S., Australia and Hong Kong.

“I’m just trying to speak to addiction, and how people are struggling, but I do think (technology has) really changed the way we do things. I’ve been in places where there’s no technology, and I see the difference — in positive ways, and not-so-positive ways.”

Too futuristic to foresee

Wellness consultants are indeed part of a thriving industry, as are sports law specialists. While ocean hotel managers, imagined as overseeing vast aquatic gigaplexes, haven’t materialized as real jobs, we do have gargantuan cruise ships capable of hosting upwards of 10,000 people in luxurious comfort.

The top streamers on Twitch can make close to $7 million per year. On YouTube, another popular platform, the numbers are even higher, with Daniel Middleton, from the U.K., raking in $25 million, just ahead of Ontario’s Evan Fong at his $23 million.

This past summer, Rogers Arena hosted The International, the world’s most lucrative eSports tournament. Tickets for the event sold out in minutes. The arena was filled to capacity as fans watched 18 teams and 90 players compete for $34 million in prize money playing Dota 2.

Players on Team Liquid play Team OpTic during the International Dota 2 Championships in Vancouver on Aug. 20, 2018.DARRYL DYCK /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

The owners of the building, the Aquilini Group, launched its first eSports team — the Vancouver Titans — earlier this month. The team plays Overwatch, another hugely popular video game.

Nineteen-year-old Justin Mackey is a second-year computer science student at the University of British Columbia, and a member of the UBC eSports Association. He’s seen a big uptick in interest in the fledgling sport.

“Everyone was very excited to have a team, whether it be Canadian or not, that represented Vancouver,” he said. “(After) seeing the big surge of … the Vancouver Titans and The International being in Vancouver and all these major tournaments happening, they’re starting to take more of an interest.”

In a way, eSports is paralleling the path of the current traditional sports model. The idea that a career can be made out of it has spawned plenty of cottage industries, from coaching to player nutrition. Universities are now boasting their own eSports teams, and scholarships are becoming available to budding gamers.

But much like traditional sports, the dreams players are being sold of professional careers come with astronomical odds. For a high school student, an NCAA study found that the odds of making it as a pro in the big four sports were tiny: baseball (0.6 per cent), football (0.08), basketball (0.03) and soccer (0.04).

“I do think there’s a different belief, speaking as someone who played high-level hockey. I was always told, regardless of whether I made the NHL or not, hockey would help me in business,” said Adair. “It was always ‘make sure that you’re healthy and learning and going to school, and make sure you have a backup plan in case you don’t make it.’ The attitude I see from students or people pursuing eSports is far more all-in. It’s far more ‘this is the only thing I want to do, and this is the only option.’

“There are more people competing for the same amount of spots. In Dota 2, or League of Legends, you’re thinking ‘I have a chance,’ but you’re not calculating the number of players pursuing that. It’s significantly larger than the number trying to make the NBA.”

Video games not entirely bad

Some studies have shown that those who play sports video games are more likely to play the actual sport, but sports games only account for around 10 per cent of sales. Nearly half of all video games are first-person shooter or action games.

The early research seems to show that most addictions don’t develop until the players are in their late teens or college, but the groundwork for their vulnerability is set much earlier.

“They’re able to get away with it (at younger ages) … because they have more parent supervision. But then when they go off to college, that’s where it begins to manifest,” said Adair. “Harder classwork, more responsibility, more stress, a change in their social environment, less supervision usually — they’re an ‘adult’ now — and gaming is a way to deal with stress. They’re stressed, they’re gaming … that stresses them more, and it’s just like this negative spiral happens.”

The World Health OrganizationÂ officially designated video game addiction as a disorder in June.artisteer /
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“It’s not just as simple as you just don’t talk to your mom for a day. There’s usually more complicated stories attached to those diagnoses,” said Loudon. “When you try to enter a conversation about gaming with your child, what do their behaviours look like? Are they defensive? Are they open to the conversation? Are they willing to put down the controller and go outside? Are they becoming aggressive or are they sneaking it?

“You want to look for things like the isolation, the eating, spending more than a couple hours on the game.”

Loudon says she’s sat in on hundreds of family conferences during her career, listening to families talk about addictions, and the manifest behaviours she’s heard about are the same as those involving chemical addictions. But that, at its core, is the crux of the issue. The drug of choice is the dopamine produced by one’s own brain.

“It’s about giving the young person experiences that are going to give them dopamine releases as well,” she said of how to combat it.

“Playing soccer, going for a walk, having a good meal, connections with family … all of that is going to give them dopamine releases as well, but they’re natural ones. They might not be as flooding as the video game, but you can reset your dopamine system, definitely.”